


Escape

by TheWalkingGrimes



Series: Tales of District Four [22]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Depression, Discussed sex trafficking, Dissociation, F/M, Finnick goes to therapy, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, but it's District Thirteen so it's not exactly ideal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:46:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28683507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWalkingGrimes/pseuds/TheWalkingGrimes
Summary: Finnick and running.
Relationships: Annie Cresta/Finnick Odair, Katniss Everdeen & Finnick Odair
Series: Tales of District Four [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2018845
Comments: 4
Kudos: 34





	Escape

His District-Thirteen-assigned therapist is nice. Finnick likes her, even if he can’t remember her name. 

He’s always been good with names. Names are important to people and they like it when you use them. So Finnick has always made a point of committing them to memory, along with any other detail they tell him. Likes, dislikes, where they come from, who they care about, what scars they carry. Knowing these sorts of things makes him feel more in control - or at least gives him the illusion of control.

His therapist likes the green jello that the cafeteria makes on the last Friday of every month. That’s the only detail about her that’s stuck with him.

Stuck. Finnick is stuck. His therapist says he has a sticky brain. Usually it helps him remember and hold onto things, details that a healthier brain would probably let him forget. Right now though there’s no room in it for anything new. He’s too stuck on everything that’s happened, everything that _could_ be happening in the Capital, that there’s no space for the petty details of things like what he ate for breakfast or whether he was scheduled to meet with the President of Thirteen. 

Or his therapist’s name.

“Finnick, last time we talked about dissociative episodes.” The therapist is saying to him. She seems brighter for some reason today. “You said that you’ve experienced them before.”

“Did you get your jello?” Finnick asks.

He’s thrown her. “What?”

“Your jello.” He repeats. “The one the cafeteria serves on Fridays at the end of every month. You seem happy today, I was wondering if it’s because you got your jello.”

The quiver of her lips indicates that she’s suppressing a laugh. “Well, it’s Tuesday,” she tells him kindly, as if the days of the week mean anything to him anymore. “And no, I suppose I just woke up in a good mood today. You’re very perceptive.”

Finnick should probably tell her that he doesn’t remember her name. He doesn’t. “What were we talking about?”

“Dissociation.” The therapist gets back on track swiftly. “You mentioned during our last session that you’ve experienced it in the past. When did that start?”

“What’s dissociation?” 

She’s explained this to him before. She must have, because apparently he said that he experienced it before, but Finnick doesn’t remember doing that or even what dissociation is. 

When he first got here, they put him with a different therapist at first. One who was older, and impatient, and seemed mostly focused on getting him to _snap out of it._ She ended up walking out of the session after she yelled at him to pay attention and he started crying. 

This newer therapist is nicer. She never yells at him for making her explain something two, three, twenty times to him. “Well, dissociation covers a wide range of things, but we were specifically discussing periods of time where you feel disconnected from your environment, and/or your body.”

Right. She means going somewhere else. Like Annie does when she -

 _No, Finnick focus,_ he scolds himself. He’ll be even more useless than usual if he starts thinking about _her_ right now, and how awful and terrified she must be feeling trapped in the Capital surrounded by enemies and people who want to hurt her, back in the place that had scarred her so badly, all those people laughing at her pain and calling her crazy.

“Finnick, do you want to tell me about the first time you can remember experiencing something like that?”

Not particularly, no, but that sounds a million times less awful than thinking about Annie right now and he deserves to suffer anyway. He wants to hurt, and if he’s able to use that hurt as a distraction from thinking about the thing that keeps destroying him, all the better.

“First time it happened was-” _hands shoving him down on his knees, harsh enough to leave bruises if the carpet weren’t so soft. Words commanding him to do something that he can’t do, doesn’t even know where to begin, and he tries to protest, to explain that he can’t do this, but that’s not something the person standing over him wants to hear._

_The backhand across his face tilts his world sideways._

_Literally, because he crumples on his side gasping in pain, but metaphorically too. No one has touched him like this since the arena. He’s spent half his life learning how to take a hit and give back just as good or better than he gets. Except that part of his life was supposed to be over._

_And in a sense, it is. Because when they said “You don’t need to fight anymore” they didn’t mean “You’re safe now.”_

_They just meant “Don’t fight.”_

“Finnick.” The voice of the therapist calls his attention back. “You were saying the first time you experienced a dissociative episode was when?”

He shakes his head, trying to expel the flashes like water from his ears. “I was fifteen.” Saying those words feels alien, because they would have gotten his tongue cut out before. Or worse, Mags or Annie would have suffered for them and -

Annie. Annie, Annie, Annie. Oh god what are they doing to her?

_(He knows. He knows exactly what they’re doing to her. He’s just too much of a coward to accept it.)_

“You were fifteen.” The therapist prompts him, way more patient than he deserves. It’s really incredible how she never gets tired of having to parrot back everything he says. “What happened?”

_Mijo. Tell me what happened._

_Mags’s weathered hands push through his hair. She’s crying._

“Snow sold me to a Gamemaker.” Finnick tells her, expecting lightning like in the arena to strike him down as the words leave his mouth, they’re so blatantly treasonous. But of course he’s already committed far worse treason than this, and the worst has already happened. Mags is dead, and Annie’s been taken.

Still, the words _do_ feel monumental and he’s a little annoyed when they don’t shock her. Maybe she doesn’t understand what he means. 

“For sex.” He persists, watching her face to see if it will fall. “A fifty year old man who a year earlier built an arena to kill me. They blackmailed me with my family’s lives.”

The therapist doesn’t waver. “That sounds incredibly traumatizing. I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

Irritated, it occurs to him that she’s not shocked because she already _knows._ Maybe Haymitch or even Plutarch informed her. It makes Finnick wonder how many people at Thirteen have been told. 

Rationally he knows that makes sense - he’s not the only Victor to ever be sold, it’s not just his private business, this is war and anything that can be used as proof of the corruption in Snow’s administration is valuable ammunition. Still, as the only Victor currently in District Thirteen that’s been sold before, that feels like something Finnick should have been consulted on before they started airing out his dirty laundry to a bunch of strangers. 

Or maybe they did and he just doesn’t remember. Much as he hates to admit it, that is fairly likely.

“You seem upset. Did I say something to upset you?”

“Who told you?” Finnick asks, trying to quash the disappointment that his moment of truth was taken from him. He shouldn’t be so surprised at this point. “Someone obviously told you, because that’s not the kind of thing someone doesn’t react to.”

He doesn’t really expect her to be honest with him, which will give him the excuse he needs to clam up and refuse to talk anymore and then eventually be allowed to return to sleep. 

To his surprise, she actually gives him an answer. “Beetee. He came to visit you early on and was concerned that ‘we did not have the adequate information to give you the proper treatment.’”

That does sound like Beetee. And in spite of himself, Finnick finds himself relaxing because Beetee’s probably the smartest person he knows and he doubts the aloof Victor would have involved himself unless he thought he had good reason to. 

“So you already know everything I’m telling you then.”

“Not at all.” The therapist refutes immediately. “You’ve already given me more information than I had. And regardless of what I know, it’s _your_ experience Finnick. Every person responds to trauma differently. And you’re saying in your case, your response was to dissociate?”

She’s a stranger. He doesn’t even know her name. 

For some reason, something about that feels safe to him.

“Not… the first time.” Finnick admits. “The first time, I didn’t know how bad it was going to be. And then I kept thinking it would stop.” He’s never spoken so much about that night before, not in this sort of detail. He told Mags about what had happened to him, and talked to Annie about how he felt about it, but this is the part that he always glossed over. How he’d actually survived it. 

“I mean I really didn’t think it would hurt that bad. I had no idea, until it was happening. And then there was nothing to do except just… cry and scream and try to get through it however I could. And when it was over I was just... _done_ and then he - he wanted to do it _again.”_

He remembers the feeling like he’s right back in that room - the rush of sudden _unfairness_ that had swept over him. “I was so close to breaking, and I think my brain just acted instinctively. Because when it happened again I wasn’t there. Not the way I was the first time.”

“Dissociation can be a powerful coping mechanism.” The therapist informs him. “When fight or flight isn’t an option, as is often the case in rape.”

That word prickles at his skin. He thinks about being sixteen and wanting to tell his mother that, then dismissing it as ridiculous. _You can’t rape something you own._

 _They don’t own you._ Annie’s voice is different than it usually sounds in his head these days - full of anger instead of fear. _They can’t own you, Finnick._

Annie’s always right, so Finnick doesn’t push against that word like he wants to. “Yeah, I guess it’s like my body couldn’t run away, so my mind decided to instead.”

“And is that a coping mechanism that you used often?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t. That’s not what they wanted, me spaced out like that. And there was one time, when I let myself drift and I -” _hands closing around a pale throat, that rush of sick power_ “-I lost control. And I paid for that. Or, someone else did. After that, I never let myself go away again. I couldn't afford it.” 

_An allergic reaction. Strawberries._

_My mother loves strawberries. She eats them all the time._

_Allergies can develop. These things happen._

_(Accidents do happen, you know.)_

“I imagine that must have been terrifying, to live like that.” The cool honesty in the therapist’s voice grounds him back to reality. “Having the lives of the people you love held over your head for so many years.”

“Well I didn’t do a very good job, did I then?” Finnick snaps at her, as her words echo in his head _people you love held over your head - people you love held - your love held - Finnick I’m sorry Victor’s Isle was attacked we couldn’t get Annie out in time they’re holding her in the Capital._ “Because they’re all either dead or worse.”

“But was that really your job?” The question stumps him, and he can only stare blankly at her. “Is that your fault, or is it the fault of the people who put you in an impossible position when you were only fifteen years old?”

“I was basically sixteen.”

“Finnick, it doesn’t matter. You were a child, and they exploited you-”

“I was a Victor.”

“That doesn’t mean you weren’t a child.”

He laughs. “Don’t you turn all your children into soldiers at fourteen here? Seems like I was right about on the expected timeline.”

“We don’t send our children into combat, just non-combat assignments.” The therapist seems mildly offended at the turn their conversation has taken. “And the age of consent here is eighteen.”

“Bet the teenagers _love_ that.”

“There is a difference between two teenagers engaging in consensual sex and a fifty year old man preying on a fifteen year old child.”

“But I wasn’t fifteen when I got my mother killed.” Finnick spits out. “And I wasn’t when-”

He stops himself.

“When what, Finnick?”

“Nothing,” he mumbles, and pretends to get lost in his head again. At that exact moment he feels lucid, sharper than he has in days, but he’d almost gotten away from himself and admitted that part of him regrets agreeing to Plutarch’s proposal. That he wishes he hadn’t put his life on the line for the rebellion. 

Because he should’ve known that it wasn’t _his_ life he was putting on the line. It never had been.

A part of him had just assumed he would end up dying to save Katniss, honestly. A part of him still wishes that he had. Then maybe Annie would be safe. Or she could have at least died with the other District Four Victors in the attack on their home.

But he can’t voice any of his regrets to his part in the rebel plan because that _is_ treason here, and these sessions are probably about as confidential as his joke of a post-Victory session with a guidance counselor who deemed Finnick wasn’t going to snap and kill anyone and was safe to release out in public. 

_(He wonders now if they were evaluating him for his potential usefulness in the future._

_The same way District Thirteen is evaluating him now to see if he can be useful to them._

_Some things never change.)_

“You weren’t fifteen when what, Finnick?”

“Can I be done now?” He asks, because he doesn’t know why he ever thought he could trust her in the first place. This stranger with information on him that he never told her, who’s reporting to other strangers with power over him that he’s barely even spoken to, who want to use him even though they refuse to do literally the only thing he’s asked of them.

At least when he’d been following Snow’s orders, Annie had been safe. 

“We still have twenty minutes left in this session.”

“I’m tired.”

He is. He’s always tired these days. Finnick never used to be a heavy sleeper, between his conditioning in training and then later the Capital, and just a general aversion because of the nightmares. He’s only ever liked sleeping when he’s with Annie.

Almost all of his dreams now are about Annie. Most of them are nightmares. 

But sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re just dreams of them laying in bed, holding each other like they did in those last days before he went back into the arena and ripped their world apart. 

Those dreams are so addictive that he’ll fight his way back to sleep just for the chance of having one.

The therapist doesn’t let him go but he ignores all her questions, just hunches into a miserable crouched position and waits for it to be over. She doesn’t try to touch him or pull him out of it, the way the first therapist would have. 

Now that Finnick thinks about it, he does remember a lot more poking and prodding at the beginning of his time here. As well as a couple of uncomfortable instances where someone had forcibly changed his clothes when he was too apathetic to do it himself. Finnick had _hated_ that, but never protested too loudly or tried to push them away - they were just doing their job, and he was the one who was making it harder by being too broken to do something as simple as putting on a hospital gown.

Then abruptly one day they stopped. At the time Finnick just assumed they were trying to show him tough love by forcing him to dwell in his own smelly clothes until that motivated him to at least pretend to be a functional human being. Now he wonders if maybe he has Beetee to thank for that.

Eventually their time runs out. The therapist is clearly disappointed at their halted progress but tells him he did a good job today. 

“I hope you get your jello in three days.” Finnick tells her, mostly just to prove that he does remember it’s Tuesday.

“That’s next week, but thank you.”

* * *

_Annie hums as she traces a thumb under his eyes. “Hmmm, you’re getting wrinkles.”_

_Finnick groans and places his hand over hers. “Don’t say that. Talia’s going to come after me with her needles to fill them out.”_

_“She’ll have to fight me.” Annie says, even though they both know that Talia barely knows who Annie is and Annie has absolutely no say in Finnick’s beauty regimen. Still, it’s fun to pretend sometimes. “I love your smile crinkles, they’re cute.”_

_“Well, I think your crow’s feet are cute.” Finnick teases her, even though Annie’s skin is flawless and even more youthful than his. She definitely doesn’t have crow’s feet. “And your hairy mole.”_

_“I do_ not _have a hairy mole.”_

_“Yes you do, you just can’t see it. It’s on your-”_

_“Finnick!” Annie squawks, undignified and red, and her hand slides over his mouth. “You take it back.”_

_He kisses at her palm, wrapping his hand loosely over her wrist and moving it out of the way so he can tell her, “I’m sorry. You’re flawless of course. Even with your hairy mole.”_

_She sighs at him, face still flushed but fighting a losing battle against a brilliant smile. “What am I going to do with you?”_

_“Make an honest man of me someday, hopefully.”_

_In spite of the warm glow enveloping them, the room is suddenly very cold. Finnick registers that he can’t actually feel her wrist underneath his fingers._

_“Annie,” he begs, realizing what’s happening and grabbing for her._

_His hand passes right through her._

_“Annie, don’t go.”_

_“Finnick, you can’t stay here. This isn’t real.”_

_“I don’t care.” He scrambles toward her, even as she moves further and further away. “Real hurts too much and this is perfect. Let’s just stay here.”_

_“No.” Annie’s voice is stern, but sad. “You’ve got people that need you. No more running, Finnick. You need to wake up.”_

* * *

Finnick wakes up when they’re bringing dinner in. Everyone’s gossiping about the newest propo, with footage of ‘The Mockingjay’ fighting in District 8.

“They bombed a hospital.” Some of the nurses say. “It was horrible. They’re going to run it in ten minutes.”

He peers past them to see that Katniss is curled up on her bed, staring at the wall. She looks a little bruised up, but mostly fine. 

On the outside.

Finnick stands up on shaky legs and carries his tray over to her bed. “Want some company?”

Relief floods her features. There’s something so young, so fragile, in her face. Sometimes it’s easy to forget she’s only seventeen. Right now, Finnick can't remember how he could ever forget.

“Yeah, but I already ate dinner.”

Finnick eyes her empty tray. “You were hungry, huh?”

“Haymitch ate my lunch.”

“Of course he did.” Finnick glances around, then sneaks his bread roll toward her. “Quick, before they notice.”

“Ah yes, your favorite: _bread.”_ Katniss drawls, tearing it in half and stubbornly giving one piece back to him. “Now we just need some oysters to go with this.”

“When this is all over, I’ll take you to the oyster farms in District Four,” he surprises himself with the promise. It’s the first time he’s said anything about the future since he stood on the Reaping Stage for the second time in his life. “None of that synthesized arena nonsense.”

The smile on her face is only a ghost, really, but something in his heart untwists at the sight of it. 

“I’ll hold you to that.” 

Suddenly it strikes Finnick that maybe he’s not the only person sitting on this hospital bed struggling to imagine a life after the rebellion.

They watch the propo. When the hospital is bombed, Katniss buries her face in her pillow.

_(I was a Victor._

_That doesn’t mean you weren’t a child.)_

Finnick puts his hand on her shoulder, and watches for her. 

_I’m sorry, Annie,_ he thinks. _You’re right._

_No more running._


End file.
